The Evolution Of Point-Of-Sale

Founder and CEO at Sezzle, a digital payments platform. Prior to Sezzle, he founded Passport, a transportation payments platform.

E-commerce is still in its infancy. Currently, it only makes up 8.3% of sales in the USA. But I believe that’s about to make a radical change. We’re on the cusp of dramatic change because point-of-sale commerce is about to hit the accelerator towards e-commerce.

In 5 years time, I predict that e-commerce payments will make up over 50% of payments in the USA.

An example of the speed at which point-of-sale solutions can change to e-commerce: My first company was part of this change in the parking industry. In 2010 I paid for parking with cash. Shocked at this archaic method, I started a company that used mobile technology to pay for parking instead. Over the next five years, I saw a dramatic shift from point-of-sale payments in the parking industry to e-commerce payments. Most large cities that installed mobile payment systems found that more than 50% of people chose to pay via their mobile phones.

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Industries Making The Shift

Parking was one of the early sectors to adopt e-commerce. Other transportation sectors were also in-line with this transition. The taxi industry changed from a cash and card industry to a mobile payments industry in dramatic fashion with the rise of Lyft and Uber.

While transportation payments are only a small part of payments as a whole, their shift towards e-commerce exemplifies my prediction. Larger sectors are coming soon. Retail and grocery are huge industries for payments, and I believe that they will be the next sectors to adopt e-commerce.

I think retail will follow along shortly. Many would argue that Amazon is the only successful major retailer in the U.S. right now, if you look at the stock charts of the major retailers over the last five years. Shopify is another successful stock on the market. They were led to their success by building systems to enable e-commerce for small brick and mortars. Shopify and Amazon have spent the last 5 years dominating some major brick-and-mortar retailers.